A mixture of Continental new and ContiRe tires has helped the UK’s Ashcourt Group achieve 20% savings across its multi-faceted road fleet.
The tires have been installed across the Hull-based construction and haulage firm’s 65-strong fleet of hook-loaders, mixer, tippers, tractor units and skip-loaders – additional use of ContiCasingManagement has brought economy of operation.
The move is part of a tire-management strategy the Ashcourt Group has developed with Continental Tyres and local dealer Adams Tyres.
The group’s transport manager, Ian Donkin, said, “When I first started here, we had a policy of fitting what might best be described as ‘economy tires’. We looked after them very carefully and changed them whenever needed, because safety drives everything we do, but those changes were far too frequent.”
As the fleet grew, Donkin took the advice of Adams Tyres and switched to Continental, a move he believes saved the company “a good 20% in terms of tire costs and associated downtime”.
Today’s Ashcourt fleet primarily uses Continental Tyres’ Hybrid range. Donkin, however, opted to run Conti Hybrid HSC1 tires on the steer axles, with ContiRe HDC1 tires on drive axles across the tippers, hook-loaders, tankers, mixers and skip elements of the fleet.
“On our on/off road fleet, we know we are going to be operating on a wide range of surfaces, from the quite rough to the really extreme. The maximum impact of these conditions always falls on the drive axles, so we anticipate greatest wear and potential for punctures on those, even with Conti tires in place,” Donkin said.
“For that reason, I decided to go with the ContiRe retread products. The ContiRe utilizes all the technology and benefits of a new Conti tire but, thanks to the ContiCasingManagements program, makes more sense from a financial perspective.”
Participation in ContiCasingManagements means that Adams Tyres takes away Ashcourt’s worn casings and the latter receives credit toward ContiRe tires.
On the fleet’s low-loaders and any other trucks that might not be required to go off road, Ashcourt runs all new Conti Hybrids across both steer and drive axles. Today, the fleet is almost all Volvo – Donkin specifies Conti Hybrids and immediately changes any tires that do not meet this requirement.
